The Electoral College lets the minority choose the president against the will of the Majority. That is called tyranny of the minority. I want to know why you think that's a good thing.
So, for one, I don't - I'm mildly in favor of direct popular votes combined with some form of runoff voting (either IRV, STV, or approval voting).
But I also get the arguments of people that say that without the electoral college, there is zero incentive for politicians to campaign in or pay attention to the interests of people in lightly-populated area. And I think that is a bad thing - whenever you completely disenfranchise people you get create a potential crack for revolution, secession, or other fragmentation processes to seep in. (It's also just shitty to the people involved.) I'd rather fix that by getting rid of first-past-the-post voting systems, but I also think you can't ignore that problem.
You still haven't answered why you believe there's an excluded middle. The opposite of tyranny is representation, and it's the system we have in the U.S. You can quibble about the degree of representation, but the fact that you can quibble about it means that we don't have a tyranny.
Do you think you are represented by the current system ?
You get to complain about being in jail when you are in jail but when you are innocent and complaining does that make it better ?
> But I also get the arguments of people that say that without the electoral college, there is zero incentive for politicians to campaign in or pay attention to the interests of people in lightly-populated area.
This is a lie probably told to you by a high school teacher who never really thought about it, and clearly you haven't either.
If the electoral college empowers lightly populated areas, how come no Presidential Candidate has ever gone stumping for those sweet sweet Wyoming voters?
Because it doesn't empower small states. It doesn't empower big states. It empowers closely contested states.
The electoral college makes no sense, it was not designed this way, the designers tried to get rid of it after they saw how it was being abused.
It's non-democratic, nonsensical, and there has been ~75% support for abolishing it for over 100 years but politicians have been holding off because it makes elections easier for them to fight because it lets them ignore most of the voters.
Does the EU presidency have a popular vote? Why aren’t the various leaders of the EU all German since Germany has the most people?
I love the electoral college. For those that bother to understand that America is a republic; the system was nearly perfectly designed. If we can get back to the original method of electing senators and back to the idea of “these United States” rather than “the United States,” we’d all be happier. States should have increased sovereignty. The 10th Amendment ought to matter.
Dude, the Electoral College takes sovereignty AWAY from the states, and concentrates it in only 4-5 states where the race is close.
If the Electoral College made every state matter equally, then candidates would be campaigning for support in every state equally. It is a fact that that's not what the Electoral College does.
Also, the Electoral College in its current form was not "designed". It was a mistake. The people who designed it, Hamilton and Madison, tried to get rid of it with constitutional amendments after they saw how it was being abused with "winner-take-all" laws.
You’re confusing where people campaign with who has influence.
Wyoming, as a state, has as much influence as California - and that’s how it was designed. Nobody campaigns in either state very much, because their state wide preferences are mostly set - but that doesn’t mean they have no influence.
A majority of state electors pick the president. The president won the most states, so he is president.
In the EU, is Ireland less important than Germany? Why doesn’t Germany get to pick the EU president each time? Since Germany has over 80 million people, they could team up with France and simply own the EU. Ireland and Poland would be forced to go along with whatever Germany and France wanted. Or, they would leave the EU.
If California and New York picked the president every single time, why would other states bother staying in the Union? If you just have to win New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago, then every single policy proposal would simply be to benefit those voters alone. You could deny federal protections and funding to every other part of the country because you’d rather have more money to spend in New York City. It would become just like the Hunger Games where the “districts” would serve the capitol.
The current system has worked for 200+ years. Just because some people didn’t like outcome, doesn’t make the system broken.
